A Woman's Work
by dezolis13
Summary: What if Rose really was the evil witch everyone thinks her to be?


A Woman's Work

She didn't want her assignment to end like this. Rose's protestations of love for Jack hadn't been completely false – just…_mostly. _She had a certain fondness for him. God knows he'd been the most attractive of her assignments, possibly more beautiful than her, but with a lean, taut body to make up for that. She'd miss the sex. Oh, she supposed she might miss him personally too. So damned earnest about everything but himself, he made naiveté endearing to a point. And the blind, unconditional love he offered was rather flattering.

It was akin to having favorite character in a movie that you hoped got a happy ending. She'd known all along how unlikely that outcome was to be but she thought it would have been nice for him to have some sort of ending other than just being ended. But after running the gauntlet of the Big Shell and being left to face off against a relatively fresh and well-armed Solidus, it was looking like there'd be no triumphant return in the sequel for him.

Though an AI program had already taken over for her, the codec channel was still open on her side, leaving her free to listen in on her employers trying to talk Jack to death. Rose wondered what Solidus could be doing to let Jack stand there, minutes on end, listening to the voices in his head yammer about conspiracy theories and human weakness. In theory, Rose should be horrified at what the 'people' she worked for were trying to do. In practice, as long as her paycheck cleared, she could live with it. If it wasn't some blathering AIs running the show, it would be blathering politicians and corporations doing it. At least this way, she wouldn't have to put up with a boss who expected a little sumthin' from his pretty underlings.

At long last, the AI shut up. There wasn't much on the channel after that, only Hal Emmerich offering up such pearls of wisdom such as attacking the guy who'd just lost his right eye on the right side. _Duh_, Rose thought but Jack seemed to appreciate it. He appreciated whatever bones a person tossed him. She was grateful for that; otherwise it might have taken more than hair dye (she looked better as a brunette anyway) and a nose job (Bye, too long schnoze!) to entice him.

So there was that too. He'd been an easy assignment, no complications. Okay, there was one fairly minor complication (_Stupid pill. 98% effective, my ass_) but that could be dealt with and had provided great improv material for when they'd told her to mess with his head.

And then, miraculously, she no longer had to refer to him and her assignment in the past tense. Jack won. She shouldn't be so shocked. He'd faced down a bomb planting nutbag on roller blades, an emo with a BFG, a freaking jet, an immortal bi-sexual vampire, a herd of Rays and crippling childhood trauma without curling up into a ball and crying for Mommy (_just Snake_). What was one ex-presidential foster father in samurai tentacle armor?

_God, he's fucked up_, she thought. A message flashed across her screen. _And he's about to get more fucked up_.

She had new orders, or rather a repetition of her old orders. She was to stay with Jack and keep an eye on him and his associates. Rose assumed they meant Jack's shiny new mentor/friend, Solid Snake. She didn't know much about him, only that, with the exception of this exercise, he generally popped up whenever and wherever it was convenient for the Patriots. It made sense. The guy was great at dealing with weird shit and all the relevant shit stirrers were either old friends or part of his secret clone family. These intricate conspiracies flowed much smoother when everybody knew each other.

If Rose hurried, she might even meet up with this Solid Snake herself. The last thing she heard over the codec was Emmerich telling Jack to stay put, Snake was on his way. That would make Jack so happy. His hero and the love of his life rushing to his side to pat him on the back for saving the day and to tell him how super the future's going to be.

She suddenly felt nauseous. She was pretty sure it wasn't morning sickness.

0-0-0

It didn't take long for her fondness for Jack to fade from favorite character status to the more grudging feeling one has for a once cute and lovable puppy that's aged into a sickly and decrepit mutt that's in the habit of leaving nasty surprises on the floor. She gave Jack some credit. When he shambled home at five o'clock in the morning after a night of drunken bar fights, he'd confine the blood and vomit to the bathroom. Even cleaned it up on the mistaken belief that he possessed the ability to hide things from her. Other than the occasional oppressive cloud of Lysol from an overzealous cover up attempt, Rose didn't care. She hated cleaning.

She was too tired for it anyway. Despite her employer's instructions and the ease that Jack's frequent absences created to play the 'Whoops! Miscarriage!' card, she was still pregnant. Or rather, it was in spite of those things. Her employers already had too much control of her life; screw them if they thought they could take that much more. As for Jack…

Superficially, he was still one pretty puppy. If she was ever going to have a kid, his genetics were the way to go. On other fronts, well…there wasn't all that much to recommend him. He wouldn't know a happy childhood from a hole in the wall very neatly labeled 'hole' and 'wall' with a long description of how both came to be hanging beside it. He didn't know happy adulthood either. His moods ranged from drunk and surly to sober and surly with a heaping helping of angst on the side. If he ever got his act together though, he'd be able to teach the child about all that 'love', 'compassion' and 'feeling remorse' crap. Those weren't exactly Rose's areas of expertise. Her teachings would be more along the lines of how not to be a sucker. It would be nice too, to have somebody around who could handle all the dirty work because as much as Rose hated cleaning, she hated the messes even more.

And there might have been a teensy, tiny part of her that thought taking the sprog away from him might be considered piling on.

That part of her got over it in a hurry when she received new orders. Jack was proving to be worthless in the Snake watching department. He'd had some contact with the man after the Big Shell, but in recent weeks, Jack's only real company had been the trash that occupied the dives where Jack went to wallow. In his current state, he wasn't even a worthy guinea pig for whatever mind control – societal manipulation plan du jour the Patriots were planning. They wanted her to move to greener pastures. They wanted her new target to be Roy Campbell.

Ugh. No way was she going from chiseled abs to saggy old man belly. From slender hips and firm ass to love handles and saggy old man butt. From long, thick and virile to 'yes, honey, I'll pick your Viagra prescription up at the pharmacy'.

Ugh.

She didn't have anything personal against the man. After the Big Shell, Snake and Emmerich had contacted him and through a little digging had found out that Campbell actually was Jack's CO; he'd just never received the paperwork telling him that so he'd be off doing his own thing while AI Campbell set up camp in Jack's psyche. It was very Patriot to mix a dab of truth in with a mound a lies. For some reason, Campbell had felt some responsibility toward Jack (probably from Snake telling him to) and had tried to be a real CO. Jack had told him in various, but always certain, terms to fuck off. Rose found the whole mess to be ludicrous.

That didn't stop the old man from trying, at first with direct appeals to Jack and then later with indirect appeals to her. The Patriots thought that would be a great opening for her to make the transition. Campbell was a favored Snake dispatching puppet and they wanted her to be around to keep a close eye on the strings.

It was a smart plan. It was a practical plan. But, yeah…UGH.

So Rose came up with her own version of the plan.

0-0-0

She started the plan during Campbell's next courtesy call. He wanted to know how Jack was doing and she gave him an earful. She choked out a few sobs and 'what am I going to do?'s and he was soon eating out of her hand. The profile she'd gotten on him said he had a weakness for the ladies. Apparently that translated into not being able to resist White Knighting even the ones he had zero chance of scoring. Whatever. It got her what she wanted.

That left Jack to take care of. She had to wait awhile to get him at a time when he was A) actually home and B) sober enough to understand what she was saying. Surprisingly, B was easier than A. His pattern had shifted from coming home several hours late to several days.

He said he had a reason. He claimed he'd met some woman named Eva and she knew something about that Gurlukovich woman's child. It sounded like he had himself a nice little project to work on. It sounded like it was something she really ought to inform her employers of too but after they'd told her to go fuck an old man, Rose wasn't in a sharing mood.

That was her gift to him, keeping it concealed and freeing him up to go on his grand rescue mission, when she finally dealt the Miscarriage Card. He looked that particular gift horse in the mouth because he wasn't quite sturdy enough to look Rose in the eyes. She disliked kicking the puppy when he was down but she wasn't kicking him as hard as she could, nor was she doing any damage that couldn't heal. She was letting him go. That was a lot more than her other assignments ever got.

She didn't think he'd appreciate being told how lucky he was in that regard so she didn't tell him anything else at all. In a fit of well practiced tears, she left their apartment, claiming she couldn't stand being there any longer. She wasn't the only one. When she returned later that night, Jack was gone. She knew him well; he wouldn't be returning any time soon.

Neither would she. With this stage of the plan down, the next thing for her to do was settle into Campbell's house.

0-0-0

Campbell had a nice house. He opened it up to her completely, letting her take the bedroom of her choice and giving her free reign to fire whichever staff she didn't think she could trust with their secret. Technically, Rose didn't trust anybody (except Jack, who was too needy to be maliciously deceptive to anybody but himself) but she made a show of it, interviewing each one. In the end, they all got the boot. Campbell questioned it briefly but shut his mouth after Rose bemoaned how tragic it would be if, after all she'd put poor Jack through to keep him and their family safe, there turned out to be one of those evil Patriot spies lurking amongst them.

From there, it was a matter of hiring cleaning and lawn service with minimum wage slaves who wouldn't try to get chummy with her like Campbell's recently released maid. She was here to watch Campbell, not be pals with the staff. She'd do the cooking herself if the mood struck her. When the mood struck her, she could be a very good cook indeed. That event was just so seldom, she would make a bunch of over-salted, under-cooked crap in the interim to discourage people from getting any ideas about keeping her in the kitchen. Campbell had enough money to be getting take out all the time anyway.

It didn't take long for her to settle in, settling in on two favorite spots: lounging poolside to enjoy the last sun and heat of the summer and in the living room, smack in front of the big ass TV Campbell had recently acquired at her behest. She enjoyed the laziness. She was supposed to be keeping a low profile as it was, the better to sell her Patriot paranoia story to Campbell. Truthfully, she wanted to stick to the story closely. Though she was exactly where they wanted her to be, doing exactly what they wanted, she'd been a little creative in getting there. Her employers weren't too keen on their drones making innovative interpretations of their orders.

Rose passed the next few months in leisure. Campbell was an open book from which she could easily read her employers bedtime stories. Her pregnancy proceeded without problems. All was quiet on the Jack front, both from his continuing refusal to contact her or from overhearing any words on the Patriot grapevine that he'd been up to something naughty.

It was almost like a vacation, her body even getting into the act as the tiredness and nausea faded.

Unfortunately, all good things have to come to an end.

0-0-0

Rose had always been a master at denial. She specialized in it, really, creating her own little realities in which she and her assignments lived and everything went her way. This influence did not extend to in utero. Fall came and brought not the lovely glow and sweet feelings of impending motherhood she'd anticipated but a spate of sleepless nights formed from a combo of back pain and emergency bathroom trips. As annoying as it was though, she could respect the kid for asserting that he was the one that was going to be in control.

She hired a midwife as going to a hospital didn't fit into the Campbell narrative. The midwife was a stern, older woman who'd been in the field so long as to have seen just about everything and to know that discretion was the better part of getting paid. She was curt with Rose, interested only in the mechanics of delivery and eschewing all the sentimental garbage. All that was missing was a feint German accent.

Rose didn't mind the woman's precise professionalism until she went into labor one day and was still in it the next and the midwife's idea of reassurance was blithely recalling labors that lasted for days. Rose didn't have to go quite that long. After a mere seventeen hours of excruciating pain, a boy, looking somewhat like a slimy potato, was brought forth into the world. Thank god she'd read enough books to know the potato thing wouldn't last.

She named him John, a form of Jack's much hated, not-even-really his name. It was a both a way to provide the expected homage to his father as well as sticking it to him for the seventeen hours.

0-0-0

As she thought, John soon lost the spud-like appearance. The wisps of black hair he'd been born with fell out and were replaced with a thick growth that didn't bother to flirt with blond the way Jack's hair had and headed straight for platinum. His eyes performed a similar trick, starting out blue like a lot of white children's eyes before fading into grey. And, damn, was he ever white. He had the same pasty skin tone that had caused Rose to wonder countless times how Jack had survived a childhood in western Africa without getting sunburned to a crisp.

In short, anybody who'd seen Jack for more than two seconds and possessed more than two brain cells to rub together should have been able to figure out who the kid's father was. Should have – but didn't. Once her self-imposed exile ended, Rose had no problem passing her (also too big) child off as Campbell spawn to her old acquaintances. John was an exceptionally cute baby. Perhaps that added to the extra stupidity people seemed to acquire whenever a baby was around. Rose thought maybe people were being too polite to state the obvious, but no, as she studied their faces and body language for the telltale signs that they knew she was full of shit, she didn't find a thing, even after they asked her why she was staring at them.

It helped that Campbell was doing all he could to sell the lie. He'd been a bystander in his own daughter's childhood, stuck in the role of the doting uncle instead. It still caused him pain (enough that Rose checked all impulses to ask him 'what did you expect, banging your brother's woman?') and he compensated by spoiling John. As for his daughter/niece, she showed up at the house one day for the sole purpose of repeating the rumors of his marriage and fatherhood at a very loud volume and telling Campbell where he could go and what should be up his ass when he went there after he told her they were true. She never showed again for an encore performance.

Rose felt a twinge of pity for Campbell given how nice and gullible he'd been to her during the execution of her plan. Not sorry enough to forgo reporting the estrangement between Campbell and his daughter to her employers for all the possible manipulation opportunities it provided, but when she made dinner that night, she went easy on the salt and set the oven timer correctly.

0-0-0

Over the months, being stuck at home with a small child as her main company got a little tedious for Rose. Though she swore John was smarter than those lumps in the play group she'd signed him up for, the smartest toddler in the world couldn't provide conversation beyond burbling sounds that only vaguely resembled English. The soccer moms that hovered over their lesser children weren't much better. Rose needed a hobby.

She told Campbell that she wanted a job – a real, meaningful job unlike data analysis. It only seemed fair that she contribute something to the 'family' after all he'd done for her. That got him to offer her more in the form of paying for whatever courses she might be interested in taking for this as yet defined new calling. It took her approximately one second to take him up on the offer.

Rose settled on psychology. She'd acquired an interest while studying it during her training as a spy (gotta know what makes a person tick if you want to make them tock the way you want them to). It was also one of the few professions that would give her the saintly, altruistic air she was looking for without ever forcing her to get her hands dirty while still paying well. The Patriots paid well and Campbell was taking care of all her expenses so the money wasn't really an issue so much as it was a principal. Her time would not over come cheap if she could help it.

As her studies went on and started narrowing in focus to the issues and disorders associated with combat, she discovered more bonuses. Thanks to the burgeoning war economy her employees were fostering, her field was becoming particularly lucrative. Campbell assumed she'd chosen the specialty in honor of Jack. It had been almost two years since she'd seen him and this presumed tribute to him renewed the reasoning behind her stay at Casa de Campbell. She wouldn't have been all that surprised if Campbell had started to question it. After all, sane people would have moved on a long time ago. Her perceived hostage value had to be floating around nil these days with John's not being that much higher. Jack still didn't know the kid existed and with his fearsome powers of denial, he would need more than John looking like a smaller, messier haired clone of him to convince him otherwise.

But Campbell never expressed a word of doubt. His words were of sympathy and understanding and offers of using his influence to get her placed in a sweet position with the Combat Psychology Corps.

With that many heads to play with, Rose wouldn't be bored for days on end.

0-0-0

On John's fourth birthday, there was extra cause to celebrate in the Campbell household. The United Nations had recently created a position to monitor the activities of the PMCs that were becoming more and more ubiquitous and none other than former Colonel Roy Campbell had been chosen to fill it. He was so proud of his new job that Rose simply smiled along with him. She couldn't believe how naïve he was being. The man knew the Patriots existed and how they operated, yet it never occurred to him that his new job wasn't quite the well-earned appointment it appeared to be? It never occurred to him that his new job putting him into fairly regular contact with his estranged daughter/niece was a wee bit too convenient?

Of course, all of this might have been obvious to Rose because she'd learned of the appointment a month before Campbell did. She prepared for it by ordering an extra birthday cake for John and then claiming that the bakery screwed up but if she messed around with the icing, she could make it spell out 'Happy Big Job' so just look at how perfect everything worked out!

Campbell was touched at any rate.

John insisted on carrying his Uncle Roy's cake to the table since Rose had her hands full with the still-a-birthday cake. Bless his heart, he tripped coming into the dining room and the cake splatted icing down on the floor. John cried as Campbell picked the bigger chunks up and dabbed ineffectually with a napkin at the butter cream smear now decorating his expensive hardwood floors. Rose put an arm around her son and told him it was fine, there was still more cake.

Honestly, she was actually kind of proud of the little guy for inadvertently creating such an appropriate tribute to Campbell's non-achievement.

0-0-0

Campbell's job kept him busy sticking his fingers into pies the Patriots found tasty. He had a few snacks of his own, using his status to keep track of Meryl and her pack and making behind the scene efforts to ensure she had the best assignments. Rose asked him why he never tried to keep her safe behind a desk or at least send her someplace remote where the fighting wasn't so bad. Campbell said he couldn't do that. Meryl might forgive him once this ruse was over but if he tried to coddle her, she'd be gone for good.

It was a good call and the first time Campbell had made reference to the sham marriage ending in nearly five years. Even saints run out of patience, she supposed. Hers had run out awhile ago to the point where she was half tempted to gather up John and head out someplace tropical. What held her back was that her employers had more power than ever and more resources than ever to track down a bored agent and her offspring. That and the fact that there were hardly any tropical places left that didn't have idiots shooting at other idiots.

She had no choice but to wait this out. Fortunately, she wasn't waiting for long.

One bright day, Campbell finally got the information he'd been looking for. He did with it what the Patriots counted on him to do with it: he called up Snake and his boyfriend and started the ball rolling.

0-0-0

As brilliant as the bunch of AIs were at predicting ball trajectories, there was bound to come a time when their ball hit a bump and scooted off in a direction they hadn't quite expected. They'd put this particular Snake ball into play on the belief he'd take out that pesky Liquid Ocelot and then there'd be no one left to challenge them. Snake got rid of Liquid all right, but while Snake and his pals were bouncing around, they kind of broke a really big lamp. They killed the Patriots.

Well, maybe deleted was a better word. Whatever semantics you used, humanity was at long last free from the yoke of their digital manipulators. They were liberated from the onus of the never-ending strife that fed the machine of war. The future had been entrusted to their hands and the world waited to be born anew.

It also meant Rose was unemployed. She might have hated her job, but she sure did love the salary.

_Well, shit._

She had some idea of what to do next. One of Snake's pals was the long last Jack. She'd played her roles as Snake's psych counselor and Campbell's woman carefully, which meant she hadn't found out much about him except that Snake thought he'd sounded okay when he talked to him. She was curious to find out what the hell he'd been up to all this time. Then there was the whole son he never knew about thing and Campbell was certainly expecting her to run right to him.

She certainly couldn't break cover now, not when there was nobody left to protect her from a cadre of highly trained soldiers who were unlikely to be super receptive to the truth. They'd probably get all uppity and try to take John away from her too.

So off she went with Campbell to rendezvous with the survivors of the USS Missouri. It was then that she learned that sometimes when you got your ball moving, it came back to you with most of its body replaced with some sci-fi, Frankenstein, cyborg crap.

_Well, shit. _

0-0-0

On her first call to Madnar, she got two things: an ETA on a visitation ready Jack and a lengthy lecture on how advancements he'd made in the technology of the synthetic parts would make his new body almost indistinguishable from a regular human's…except for a barcode and seam here and there and maybe there too. Rose didn't give a damn about a few marks – they couldn't be any creepier than those old tattoos – but the regular human body wasn't lean and trim and swinging the kind of pipe she was used to. She couched these concerns in slightly less frank terms and Madnar assured her Jack would look fine, and no, definitely no, he did not need to consult those special pictures she'd taken of Jack on that one night when she'd had her new camera and he'd been out of clean clothes to get the body just right.

She was going to hold Madnar to that promise. The way things were looking, Jack wasn't the only person who was going to be stuck with that body. With the ruse over and a daughter's good graces to get back into, Campbell was only begrudgingly letting her stay until she was able to find a comfy new home for her soon-to-be reunited family. A plastic sword had become John's favorite toy and weapon of mass destruction and there'd been a noticeable uptick in the quantity of ninjas in his television viewing. Madnar's assistant was giving her daily updates and she was dutifully relaying them to the other member of Jack's fan club, that Gurlukovich girl, who would otherwise bury her in emails and texts demanding to know. Amazing how pushy shy kids could become once behind a computer screen. With everyone having expectations of her and none forthcoming from herself, she felt going with the flow was the best way to go.

She thought of what it would be to have a life with Jack. A life with Jack in a cyborg body. Eh, she'd done kinkier. And after nearly five years of forced celibacy, she could appreciate having a man who was literally a machine.

There was that to look forward to at least. Other things too. She never had disliked him. At worst, she'd found the drunken, 'woe is me' routine a little trite and annoying. She could take care of that though. It might actually be nice to put all that training she did to become a counselor to a use beyond alleviating her boredom. That would leave her with pretty, devoted, somewhat mopey Jack, who could be rather sweet in that there was likely nothing on earth she could do to make him turn from her. It had been a long time since she'd basked in the glow of that kind of fervent loyalty. A woman could get used to that.

She could have that cozy life: gorgeous husband, brilliant child and a cute house in the suburbs with a homeowner association approved fence around it. She could afford it. Her counseling paychecks had stacked up alongside her real salary while she'd been riding the Campbell Gravy Train for free. That made a nice nest egg for her to go domestic in style. To force the Joneses to keep with her though, she'd probably have to keep working. Jack's unique skillset wouldn't get him hired at a McDonald's in this brave new world and like hell was she going to put up with any more 'soldier, battlefield, blah, blah, blah' talk. He could be her househusband, getting up early to make her and John breakfast and seeing them off to work and school. He'd putter around the house during the day and have it all clean with dinner on the table in the background as he greeted her at the door looking all nice for her after she'd had a hard day's work.

It was a completely ridiculous scenario, weirder in its blandness than any assignment she'd ever had. That made her think of some of the assignments she had had. They hadn't been pretty. They hadn't been sweet. They hadn't been buff. That one general had not had the best personal hygiene. Some of them had had fetishes that required a recalibration of the Kinsey scale. All of them had come because of orders she'd been required to follow. Sticking with Jack, even with the Peanut Gallery pointing the way, would be her choice.

Domestic bliss. Suburbia.

She could live with that.


End file.
